Relationship Between Trait Anxiety, State Anxiety and Awareness in Processing of Threat

Abstract

In five experiments, interference paradigms were employed to investigate the role of awareness in determining the automatic nature of attentional biases to threat in anxiety. To investigate whether attentional biases to threat occur outside of conscious awareness, participants were presented with masked and unmasked valanced stimuli. To investigate the involuntary nature of the automaticity hypothesis, computerized versions of two interference paradigms were employed. On the emotional Stroop colour naming task the central task and the distracting information were an integrated feature of the same stimulus. To investigate the separate effects of trait and state anxiety in moderating these effects, a sample of non-clinical high-trait anxious (HTA) and low-trait anxious (LTA) individuals was employed across all five experiments